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Editor’s Preface to the Fifth Edition xviiiThe resetting and reissue of the book by Princeton UniversityPress in this new fifth edition has provided the opportunity andthe stimulus finally to put the necessary work of correction andreferencing in hand. The publication of improved editions ofmany of the works Berlin quotes (not to mention the transforming effect of the internet on scholarship) has made it easier toensure increased faithfulness to the original texts, some of which,indeed, were written in English but back-translated by Berlinfrom editions in other languages – the only ones available whenhe was writing. In addition, the completion of the Englishlanguage edition of the Collected Works of Marx and Engels,available both in print and online (see page 292 below), makespossible a single method of referencing quotations from thoseauthors, by volume and page (thus: CW 20: 45).1Berlin often translates somewhat creatively. Where his versionis not unreasonably inaccurate, it has usually not been alteredto bring it into line with that in CW; where it is demonstrably erroneous, or where a different translation has become iconic,the version in CW has normally been used.Terrell Carver’s expert knowledge of most of the texts quotedby Berlin speeded up the process of identification, referencing,checking and correction, and I am greatly in his debt for his alwayscheerful and efficient help. I am also grateful to him for updatinghis guide to further reading, and for allowing me to include, as anafterword, a slightly revised version of the essay first published as‘Berlin’s Karl Marx’ in George Crowder and Henry Hardy (eds),The One and the Many: Reading Isaiah Berlin (New York, 2007).1CW, despite its title, is not complete, but Berlin did not use materialby Marx or Engels excluded from it. (Any attempt to distinguish separatelypublished works from articles in journals etc. founders on a broad reef ofpenumbral cases: so almost all titles of items in CW are given in italics.)

xvi Henry HardyMy thanks are also due to other colleagues and scholars whohelped me with individual points: Shlomo Avineri, Al Bertrand,John Callow, Joshua L. Cherniss, Georgina Edwards, SteffenGroß, Nick Hall, Jürgen Herres, Helen O’Neill, Ulrich Pagel,Tatiana Pozdnyakova, Jürgen Rojahn, Norman Solomon, SimonToubeau and Josephine von Zitzewitz.The footnotes in this edition are editorial, except where theauthor relegated a comment to a note. It should be self-evidentwhich these authorial notes are, but, for the avoidance of doubt,editorial notes that go beyond the provision of bibliographicalreferences are enclosed in square brackets. Cross-references topages are by page number alone; those to notes are in the form‘123/4’, i.e. page 123, note 4.A number of drafts of the first edition of the book survive,as well as research notes, showing how the text developed on itsjourney to published form. One factor at play was the word limitset by the editors of the series in which it appeared – the HomeUniversity Library – which necessitated substantial cuts inBerlin’s original text.1 Towards the end of his process of revisionhe wrote to his friend Cressida Bonham Carter: ‘I must finish K.Marx, of which now only 7000 words remain to be cut: it is anabsolutely hateful process, every evening I count up little dropsof blood & measure the cup: all the purple passages are gone, &now the turn of the facts has come, towards which I now feelvindictive & eliminate them gaily.’2Three more editions appeared in Berlin’s lifetime, thoughthe additions made in a reprint of 1960 (provided originally1The original contractual allowance was 50,000 words, increased in 1938 inresponse to Berlin’s pleas to 65,000 words. Berlin wrote over 100,000 words,which he cut to the published length of 75,000 words. Fisher had told him that‘squeezing the book into Home University format – from its original vastersize, which I pleaded for in 1936 – “would be the making of the book” ’ (IB,letter to Noel Annan, 31 August 1973).2Letter of 28 August 1938, in Isaiah Berlin, Flourishing: Letters 1928–1946,ed. Henry Hardy (London, 2004), 280.

Editor’s Preface to the Fifth Edition xviifor a 1959 German translation) would have made it more appropriate to call that a new edition than so to describe the onlyslightly amended 1948 text; but the transition from ThorntonButterworth to Oxford University Press in the latter year wasvery naturally so marked. Readers interested in the history of thetext, before and after its first publication, are invited to visit theIsaiah Berlin Virtual Library, where information on this topic isassembled, including a complete text of the first edition in whichmany of the cuts have been restored: see http://berlin.wolf.ox.ac.uk/published works/ .Berlin dedicated Karl Marx: His Life and Environment,1 as thebook has been called until now, to his parents, Marie and MendelBerlin, who gave him his own life and provided the environmentthat shaped him. This edition is dedicated to their memory.Heswall, August 2012h.h.I have dropped the subtitle from the present edition. It doesn’t comfortably fit a book so extensively devoted to its subject’s ideas, even if ‘environment’is understood in an intellectual sense. ‘Life and Opinions’, perhaps.1

ForewordAlan RyanKarl Marx was Isaiah Berlin’s first book. He was just thirtyyears old when it appeared. In Oxford and London he was alreadyknown as a dazzling conversationalist and a strikingly giftedyoung philosopher; but it was in Karl Marx that he first revealedhis special talent as a historian of ideas – the discipline in whichhe enthralled his readers for the rest of his writing life. That talentis, as such gifts often are, a talent that is easier to admire and enjoythan it is to describe; but it emerges as an astonishing ability to dojustice both to the thinker and the thought – to paint a pictureof the personalities of the men and women he writes about,without for a moment forgetting that we want to know aboutthem because of their ideas rather than their marital adventuresor their tastes in dress, and to make the picture vivid just because,although ideas have a life of their own, they are also stamped withthe characters of the men and women whose ideas they are.It is a talent that made Berlin’s essays on great ideas and greatmen a considerable art form. As readers of his collected essaysknow, Personal Impressions – the volume devoted to encounterswith his contemporaries, memorial addresses, and accounts ofthe greatness of the century’s great men – is hardly different intone and style from his Russian Thinkers or Against the Current –the companion volumes of essays in the history of ideas. It seemsalmost inconsequential that Berlin never talked to Turgenev ashe talked to Anna Akhmatova, that he never discussed the history of Florence with Machiavelli as he did discuss the history

xx Alan Ryanof eighteenth-century England with Lewis Namier. It has beensuggested that all serious thinkers inhabit an ‘invisible college’,where a silent conversation goes on between the living and theimmortal dead, and Plato is as present as the newest graduatestudent wrestling with his work. Berlin’s writing suggests theimage of something livelier and more spirited than most colleges, perhaps a vast intellectual soirée where the guests comefrom every social stratum and all possible political persuasions.Whatever one’s favourite metaphor, the effect is to bring all hissubjects fully and thoroughly to life.All the same, historians of ideas are not novelists, nor even biographers. Although Berlin gave Karl Marx the subtitle ‘HisLife and Environment’, it was Marx’s life as the theorist of thesocialist revolution that Berlin was chiefly concerned to describe,and the environment that Berlin was interested in was notso much the Trier of Marx’s boyhood or the North Londonof his years of exile, but the political and intellectual environment against which Marx wrote the Communist Manifestoand Capital. The moral of Karl Marx, however, must be takenas a comment on both Marxism and Marx himself; in his finalparagraph, Berlin observes:[Marxism] sets out to refute the proposition that ideas governthe course of history, but the very extent of its own influence onhuman affairs has weakened the force of its thesis. For in alteringthe hitherto prevailing view of the relation of the individual tohis environment and to his fellows, it has palpably altered thatrelation itself, and in consequence remains the most powerfulamong the intellectual forces which are today permanently altering the ways in which men think and act.Marxism, by way of the activities of the communist parties itinspired, turns out to be a cosmic philosophical joke against theman who created it. Marx was a theorist who argued that individuals were the playthings of vast and impersonal social forces;

Foreword xxibut as the inspiration of Lenin, Stalin and Mao Zedong, theindividual Marx was himself the originator of vast social forces.Marx argued that ideas were epiphenomena, the reflections ofsocial interests that they disguised and rationalised; but his ownideas changed the world – even if, ironically, it was in ways hewould mostly have deplored. Karl Marx offers its readers manypleasures, and not the least of them is the wry picture that Berlinpaints of the way its subject set in motion a historical drama thatcalled his whole life’s work into question.Berlin later argued at length against the doctrine of historicalinevitability, and against any attempt to make the study of history ‘scientific’ by evacuating it of moral and political concerns.Marx was the most obvious inspiration of these views duringthe 1930s and afterwards. While it is hard to believe that hisindignation against the capitalist order was fuelled by anythingother than a strong sense of justice, he frequently claimed thathis historical materialism superseded any ‘moralising’1 critique ofthe existing order, and Engels at any rate said of him that whathe had uncovered was the law of ‘development of human history’and the law of the ‘present-day capitalist mode of production’,2the laws that dictated the inevitable collapse of capitalism and itsreplacement by socialism.Berlin is neither the first nor the last critic of Marx to noticethat his professed indifference to moral considerations is hardto square with his evident hatred of the injustice and cruelty sovisible in the early years of the Industrial Revolution, and that hisassertion of the inevitability of the downfall of the capitalist orderwas equally hard to square with the way he sacrificed his healthand domestic happiness to promoting the revolutionary cause.What was distinctive about Berlin’s reaction to Marx is not thathe was affronted by these logical tensions and inconsistencies,12Moralising Criticism and Critical Morality (1847), CW 6: 318.Karl Marx’s Funeral (1883), CW 24: 467, 468.

xxii Alan Ryanbut that he spent the rest of his intellectual career thinkingand writing about their origins, about alternative visions of theworld, and about the contemporaries and successors to Marxwho thought about them too.Berlin’s Marx is an interesting figure because he was simultaneously so much a product of the Enlightenment, and so much aproduct of the Romantic revolt against the Enlightenment. Likethe French materialists of the eighteenth century, Marx believedin progress, believed that history was a linear process, not, as theancient world had thought, that it was a repetitive cycle of growthand decay; but, like critics of the Enlightenment such as Burke,Maistre and Hegel, he thought that social change had not occurredin the past and would not occur in the future merely because someenlightened persons could see that it would be more reasonableto behave in a different way. It was violent and irrational forceswhich brought about significant change, and the rationality of thewhole historical process was something we could understand onlyafter the event. His encounter with Marx seems to have inspiredBerlin to grapple with the anti-Enlightenment; he wrote afterwards at length about the anti-rationalist critics of revolutionaryand liberal projects, such as Herder, Maistre and Hamann.In much the same way, it was the people Marx slighted duringhis career who later came to interest Berlin particularly. MosesHess was the first person to appreciate Marx’s formidable energyand intelligence, but the kindest way Marx referred to Hesswas as a donkey.1 Berlin was intrigued by the fact that Hess sawsomething which Marx systematically refused to see – that thecondition of the Jews in modern Europe was impossible to resolve by the liberal recipe of assimilation – and thus became oneof the founders of the benign, liberal Zionism on which Berlinhas written so movingly.Marx to Engels, 15 May 1847, 25 January 1865, CW 38: 117, 42: 66. [Cf.Engels to Marx, 14 January 1848, CW 38: 153, where Engels refers to Hess as‘the donkey’.]1

Foreword xxiiiAgain, Marx was contemptuous of his contemporary andrival, the Russian anarchist Mikhail Bakunin; almost until theend of his life he regarded Russia as the home of every sort ofbackwardness and repression. The thought that there might be aroute to freedom and democracy that suited the Russian people’sRussianness as well as their ordinary humanity was one thatcould hardly find room in his mind; Marx’s detestation of whathe thought of as the Slav character was only part of the problem,the other being his contempt for all sentiments of nationalitythat did not more or less directly foster the advance of socialism.In the 1950s Berlin went on to reveal to English and Americanreaders the riches of nineteenth-century Russian populismand liberalism as represented by Alexander Herzen, VissarionBelinsky and Ivan Turgenev, and to argue something we needto remember today more than ever, that nationalism can be andhas been an ally of liberalism as well as the expression of atavisticand irrational allegiances that we should all be better off without.It is more than seventy years since the first edition of KarlMarx was published, and they have been tumultuous years. Thebook went to press shortly before the outbreak of the SecondWorld War; after that war, we saw forty years of cold war, followed by an uncertain peace in which hostility between two greatideological camps has given way to a coolish friendship betweengreat powers, and continuous low-level ethnic and nationalistconflict in the Balkans, the Trans-Caucasus and much of Africa.The book was published in London as Britain went to warwith Nazi Germany – and its author went to a dazzling careerin the British Embassy in Washington; it reappeared in successive editions in a very different world. The second edition waspublished soon after the war; by then the cold war was firmlyestablished, and the Soviet interpretation of Marxism was asrigid as ever. There was nothing in the work of apologists for theSoviet regime to make one think that Berlin’s emphasis on thedeterministic rigidity of Marx’s vision of history was excessive,

xxiv Alan Ryanand nothing to make one think that Marx’s materialism mighthave been less extreme than his disciples had suggested.By the time the third edition appeared in 1963, NikitaKhrushchev’s speech to the Twentieth Party Congress of 1956had taken the lid off Stalinism in front of a Russian audience; theHungarian Revolution had disillusioned British Communistsand had forced the much larger and more robust Communistparties of France and Italy to rethink their political and intellectual allegiances. This was when a new ‘humanist’ Marxism wasdiscovered (or perhaps one should say invented); attempts at arapprochement between left-wing Catholics and philosophicallysophisticated Marxists were a striking feature of the late 1950sand 1960s, and the thought that Marxism was essentially a religious faith could be seen as something of a compliment ratherthan a complaint. One of this movement’s fruits was ‘liberationtheology’, a phenomenon that would surely have been savagedby Marx himself, but another was the idea that the young Marxat any rate had been a more subtle and interesting moral critic ofcapitalist society than had been thought.A fourth edition of Karl Marx appeared in 1978. Even afterforty years it had worn extremely well, but in the previous twentyyears there had been a flood of work by writers on both sidesof the Atlantic that might have made any author reconsider hisformer views. Much of it was work of deep and dispassionatescholarship. Although many of Marx’s modern interpreterscontinued to admire Marx as the scourge of capitalism, manyothers were motivated by the challenge of knowing just whatMarx was after. The less simple-minded and the more sympathetic Marx appeared, the harder it was to give a clear accountof his thinking. Was there one Marx or two? Had he changed in1846 from a young Hegelian humanist and idealist to a scientificanti-humanist, as Louis Althusser claimed? Or was he rather acultural critic, a social analyst concerned with the alienated stateof the soul of man under capitalism? The popularity of such

Foreword xxvbooks as Herbert Marcuse’s One-Dimensional Man and Eros andCivilization suggested the rich vein of social criticism that mightbe mined by somehow reconciling Marx and Freud.The flood of scholarship in the 1960s and 1970s revealedsomething that a reader would guess from the sheer exuberanceof Berlin’s account, but which is not much emphasised in KarlMarx. For the half-way sympathetic reader, Marx offers in numer able enticements – as a voracious reader and a savage critic,who worked by testing his ideas against those of his predecessorsand opponents, Marx whets the modern reader’s curiosity aboutnineteenth-century economics, German philosophy, ancient history, the French revolutionary underground, and more. This hasits dangers; just as Marx increasingly became unable to finish anywork he started because he wanted to read everything ever written on the subjec

resolved. In order to explain what I mean by this I need to be briefly autobiographical. The previous edition of the book appeared in 1978. I was the editor at Oxford University Press responsible for oversee-ing the publication of that edition, and I was also then in the midst of editing (not under my OUP hat) the four collections